Objects have stories to tell.

October, a journal of art criticism, devoted its Fall 2006 issue to the life and work of Sergei Tret’iakov, a 20th-century Russian playwright and associate of such cultural luminaries as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Eisenstein. Tret’iakov aligned himself with the Constructivist movement, an outgrowth of Futurism that came to dominate the art of the young Soviet Union before giving way to socialist realism in the 1930s. Futurists and Constructivists alike reacted to the impressionism and expressionism that reigned during the late nineteenth century, and thus they dedicated themselves to scraping away these movements’ vestiges.

Tret’iakov’s contemporary, the artist, designer, and eventual Soviet cultural commissar Alexei Gan, offers this programmatic formulation of Constructivism, which emphasizes how thoroughly it embodies the spirit of the Communist revolution, as well as the workers’ paradise to emerge from it. He writes,

Construction must be understood as the coordinating function of Constructivism.

If the tectonic unites the ideological and formal, and as a result gives a unity of conception, and the faktura is the condition of the material, then the construction discovers the actual process of putting together.

Thus we have the “third discipline,” the discipline of the formation of conception through the use of worked material.

All hail to the Communist expression of material building!

The resulting artwork or “construction” fuses the “ideological,” “formal” and “material,” giving rise to “the third discipline,” so called by Gan, which pretends to completeness, the three elements reflecting each other harmoniously. One cannot deny the attraction of an art that so serenely synthesizes such seemingly disparate elements of existence. Others had made a similar effort before the Constructivists, most notably the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, whose idea of the “total art work” (Gesamtkunstwerk) set the standard for Wagner’s own compositions. Of course, history records what this idea of Wagner’s eventually led to — fascism.

Any art which professes to aim for an integrative fusion of the totality of all possible experience should be treated with extreme suspicion, especially when the whole “lone genius” idea yet prevails in certain areas of culture. A residuum of a whole historical development from Enlightenment idealism to Romantic individualism — a development over which has fallen the blanket term “bourgeois” — the story of the lone-genius artist is by now a familiar one. Endowed with rare gifts, the lone-genius artist manages to elevate herself above trivial affairs of the world, and in so doing, gains a unique perspective on these affairs. Her art achieves a certain transcendence by virtue of the fact that it emanates from such a place; sordid details, like patron’s influence, news of the day, rivalries or jealousies among the artist and her peers, win comparatively little consideration. They may bear on the work of art’s content, certainly, but they remain incidental to work itself, which may reflect such mundanities but is certainly not reducible to them.

In his essay “The Biography of the Object” (gated pdf) which appears in the special issue of October, Tret’iakov claims (he addresses himself to literary art specifically) that idealist or individualist biases in aesthetic reception tend to distort actual conditions of existence. “In the classical novel that is based upon the individual hero’s biography, the relative scale of the characters is largely reminiscent of Egyptian wall paintings,” Tret’iakov writes:

The colossal pharaoh is on a throne at the center; near him, in a slightly smaller size, is his wife; still smaller are the ministers and army commanders; and finally, in faceless heaps of copper coins, is the entire varied mass of the population: the servants, the soldiers, the slaves.

The perspective implicit in classical psycho-biographical novels warps the true character of external reality, bending all of its various aspects toward the central figure, who serves as the centripetal axis, each these various aspects achieving significance in proportion to how closely they orbit him. “The hero is what holds the novel’s universe together,” Tret’iakov continues: “The whole world is perceived through him. The whole world is, furthermore, just a collection of details that belong to him.”

Even consumption lacks anything remarkable; it simply represents the terminal stage of the object in its progression through “life.”

As a proper Constructivist, Tret’iakov objects to the Cartesian dualism which the psycho-biographical classical novel not only preserves but valorizes. The hero’s perspective achieves dominance at the expense of second, equally valid perspective — the perspective from which the individual designated the “hero” in the classical psycho-biographical novels  is but one entity among  innumerably many others populating the narrative’s universe. The remedy that Tret’iakov offers in “The Biography of the Object” involves adopting a perspective more in line with the latter. As a literary principle, the biography of the object presents the possibility of just such a perspective — a possibility made plausible not by some sort of God’s-eye view, but by technological advances made in manufacture. “The compositional structure of the ‘biography of the object’ is a conveyer [sic] belt along which a unit of raw material is moved and transformed into a useful product through human effort,” Treti’akov writes,

The biography of the object has an extraordinary capacity to incorporate human material. People approach the object at a cross-section of the conveyer [sic] belt. Every segment introduces a new group of people without disrupting the narrative’s proportions. They come into contact with the object through their social aspects and production skills. The moment of consumption occupies only the final part of the entire conveyer [sic] belt. People’s individual and distinctive characteristics are no longer relevant here. The tics and epilepsies of the individual go unperceived. Instead, social neuroses and the professional diseases of a given group are foregrounded.

Treti’akov’s “conveyer belt [sic],” a richly evocative trope to describe his alternative narrative process, achieves a perspective that privileges no one individual’s subjective perceptions; it instead traverses several, but only insofar as these consciousnesses are relevant to the object’s journey from raw material to commodity. Thus the biography of the object overthrows the Cartesian bias of classical novels, and, moreover, it lends dramatic force to the only sort of human experience that actually matters to any self-respecting Soviet — relations of production. The narrative culminates not with the self-realization of any particular featured subjectivity, but with the assembly and consumption of the object, which, because it requires the effort of the collective, extends whatever psychology is to be found in the narrative to the whole collective with its “social neuroses” and “professional diseases.”

Treti’akov appears dedicated to the concept of Gan’s “third discipline,” which fuses the “ideological,” “formal” and “material” into a harmonious whole. Because its own aesthetic ideology crucially involves the overturning of individualistic psycho-biography in favor of a narrative related from the point of view of an assembled object, the point of view expressed in Tret’iakov’s biography of the object literally belongs to no one, so literally no one occupies the center of this narrative’s universe. Individuals figure only incidentally, serving simply as “incorporate[d] human material” entering into composition with the raw material destined to become the finished object. The envisaged whole admits of no seams and leaves no remainder. Even consumption lacks anything remarkable; it simply represents the terminal stage of the object in its progression through “life.” Tret’iakov’s anti-Cartesian biography of the object thus endeavors to present a world without alienation, without exploitation (save that of resources), without surplus value and its extraction. The classical psycho-biographical novel, on the other hand, presents a world whose options number only two: that of the featured subjectivity upon which the whole narrative universe depends, or that of an insignificant entity dependent on the featured subjectivity for its significance.

The years since 1937, when Tret’iakov, having displeased Stalin, met his premature end, have proven fraught ones for the biography of the object. Psycho-biographical reigns undiminished, dominating even the towering novels of the 20th-century American writer Arthur Hailey. In In Defense of Lost Causes Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls the fictional subgenre Hailey pioneered “capitalist realism.” Hailey’s novels “always focused on a particular site of production or complex organization,” Žižek writes, “mixing a melodramatic plot with lengthy descriptions of that site’s functions.” In Žižek’s description one notices how elements of Tret’iakov’s biography of the object survives, albeit in an alloyed form, the elements of individualistic psycho-biography grafted onto it. Hence Žižek’s apt designation: The various elements of a site of production or complex organization” find themselves once again relegated to supporting status, the furniture of a world once again centered on a single colossal — inevitably bourgeois — consciousness.

One is tempted to conclude that Tret’iakov’s biography of the object couldn’t survive as a viable literary method without a Soviet state to lend its constant ideological support. A commercial writer like Hailey, comfortably ensconced on the other side of the Iron Curtain, carried the day, a triumph which testified to capitalism’s superiority as a political economy, one uninterested in purging itself of romantic individualism. After all, capitalism purports to reward great individuals for their mighty efforts or adventurous risks. Some people are simply born to be the masters of their Cartesian universes.

It just might be, however, that Tret’iakov’s biography of the object is an idea whose time has not yet come — that is only just now arriving. In Personal Days novelist Ed Park offers a spirited send-up of post-millennial office drudgery. The final section of the novel consists of an enormous e-mail composed on a laptop by one character, Jonah, while he is trapped in his office building’s elevator. The e-mail, which Jonah addresses to another character, a former colleague of his named Pru, ends with this rather astonishing observation:

You said yourself, once, waiting for stuff by the asthmatic printer, that the office generates at least one book, no, one novel every day, in the form of correspondence and memos and reports, all the reams of numbers, hundreds of sentences, thousands of words, but no one has the mind to understand it, no one has the eyes to take it all in, all these potential epics, War and Peace lying in between the lines.

With Jonah’s e-mail to Pru Park manages nothing less than the articulation of a peculiar narrative point of view — first-person corporate — which, incidentally, he marshals throughout the whole of Personal Days to astonishing effect, giving new impetus and texture to Dilbertian anomie. One detects in Jonah’s remarks resonances with Tret’iakov’s biography of the object. But, whereas Tret’iakov wishes to point a way toward overcoming workers’ alienation, Park simply characterizes such alienation in terms consistent with the nature of work in the early 21st century. If Tret’iakov imagines a novel without a hero, Park imagines one without a reader.

“I tweet, therefore I am.”

The difference between these two methods comes down to the condition of anonymity. For Tret’iakov, anonymity ensures everyone’s freedom from the epistemic trap of bourgeois realism, which erects a hierarchy among characters by privileging certain subjectivities to the exclusion of others — the very hierarchies that make capitalism possible. A narrative related from the point of view of the object privileges that of no one person’s. Therefore, no one exploits, and no one is exploited. For Park, on the other hand, anonymity, rather than remedying the neuroses and professional diseases of his office-drone characters, becomes the very source of their neuroses and illnesses. The contents of their consciousnesses do not correspond to cut-and-dry Marxist-Leninist categories, but to the master tropes of popular media. Worse than wage slavery or capitalist exploitation is to them the denial of the spotlight or screen time. If the sensibility informing Tret’iakov’s “Biography of the Object” is vintage communist, then the sensibility behind Park’s Personal Days is contemporary neoliberal: The valorization of the individual is everything, and the greatest anxiety one can experience comes from being the hero of the novel of one’s own life and wondering if this novel will ever be read.

Social media simply consolidate and lend greater force to the anxiety felt by the characters of Personal Days. Weblogs, Facebook, Twitter provide the treadmills necessary to fuel this anxiety. They become much more than communication devices; they become the very means by which people secure an effective ontology: “I tweet, therefore I am.” The daily output of one’s tweets or of one’s Facebook updates becomes the stuff of the first-person-corporate novel, which seduces one into thinking she is the hero of, while positioning her as merely one of many others in an anonymous collective, meeting over a virtual conveyor belt of successive tweets or updates that get pushed down the screen. The task becomes, then, not to determine how Park’s narrative method puts paid to Tret’iakov’s, but to understand how both lend themselves to insights concerning the nature of work in the Wired Age.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.

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